2023-05-18 19:48:26
My team’s announcement in 2022 of the discovery of settlements of sapiens in Grotte Mandrin, in southern France, 54,000 years ago, set back 12 millennia the first migrations of these populations on the European continent. The finding suggested that we had missed fundamental elements to explain the first colonization of Eastern Europe. A wise man.
At the beginning of May 2023 I published a macroestudio in the scientific journal PlosOne which exposes a profound rewriting of this key moment in European history. We have been able to show that the colonization of Europe by sapiens it occurred in three great waves of settlement between 54 and 42,000 years ago.
The wave of 42,000 years ago has been considered the first colonization of the continent, but it would actually be the last. The final pulse of a much older process linking Europe to the eastern Mediterranean, the comprehension of which would have eluded us entirely.
The result of the analysis has a profound impact on our conceptions of the colonization of Europe and on the history of the Neanderthal aboriginal populations, whose extinction seems to coincide quite precisely with the third wave. sapiensmarking the end of a very long process, which extends over more than 12 millennia, and of which we are only beginning to glimpse its great turning points.
Ludovic Slimak, Provided by the author
the first wave
Until 2022 seemed established that the first migrations of sapiens They settled in Europe between 45 and 42,000 years ago, settling in territories occupied exclusively, and for hundreds of millennia, by Neanderthals. But our work of 2022 revealed that 54,000 years ago there were already sapiens settled in the south of France. So they had to arrive earlier.
The study presented the analysis of nine teeth discovered in the Mandrin cave, in the Rhône Valley, and showed that all of them were Neanderthals. However, the astonishing Neronian culture, linked to several sites in the Rhône area, and based on the systematic obtaining of surprisingly standardized small flint points, must be associated with the sapiens archaic.
Already in 2004 we had recognized these Neronian traditions, pointing out their remarkably modern character from the technical point of view, but without being able to analyze their precise origin or whether they were the work of Neanderthals or sapiens.
The 2022 study also found powerful connections in craft traditions among these populations. sapiens from the Neronian of the Rhône Valley and the Early Upper Paleolithic (IUP) recognized in the eastern Mediterranean (Near East).
During a study stay of several months at Harvard in 2016, I had come face to face with these famous IUP collections from the eastern Mediterranean. I was studying the huge archaeological sequence of Ksar Akil, located on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, which, with its 22 meters of archaeological records, was the most complete in Eurasia on the latest Neanderthals and early sapiens.
Ludovic Slimak, Provided by the author
When analyzing the crafts of the sapiens I was amazed to discover its technical similarities to Neronian flint points. My confrontation with the technical traditions of these sapiens Orientals offered only one possible conclusion: the Neronian and the Levantine IUP represent a single technical tradition, here marking a very early advance from the sapiens towards western Europe.
This conclusion the I posted as soon as I returned from Harvard, in 2017 and 2019, five years before making public the study of the famous nine teeth discovered in the Mandrin cave, but, above all, two years before Clément Zanolli (researcher at the CNRS UMR PACEA) had in his hands the first of these teeth for analysis.
The conclusions The ones Zanolli arrived at coincided with mine, and he had arrived at them completely independently, in a double blind method.
The presence proposal sapiens Very Ancient was based for Zanolli on the remarkable discovery of ancient human teeth and, at the same time, he proposed a structural and global approach, comparing Neanderthal and Neanderthal craft traditions. sapiens with transmediterranean studies.
So, we have here the first wave sapiens towards Europe, which demonstrates the existence of ancient migrations that reached the west of the continent as early as 54,000 years ago.
the third wave
The third wave has been recognized for several decades. Until recently it was considered the first great wave sapiens towards Europe. We are around 42,000 years ago. This wave refers to the so-called Aurignacian traditions, the earliest expressions of which are commonly distinguished as Proto-Aurignacian.
Its attribution is also based on only a handful of human teeth, but the connection of the Aurignacian traditions with the sapiens also does not allow doubts. This technology has very precise equivalents in the early Ahmaran, the time when humans were spreading across the Levant.
In this game of correlations between East and West, the impressive archaeological records of Ksar Akil once again play an important role.
During my research at Harvard at the Peabody Museum in 2016 I was studying the set of these collections. Again, wonder. The correlations established during the last twenty years between East and West, between the Proto-Aurignacian and the Early Ahmarian of Ksar Akil, were clearly wrong.
These connections had been established mainly on bibliographical bases and with little direct information. What I saw at Ksar Akil bore no resemblance to the European Proto-Aurignacian. However, in Ksar Akil it was possible to recognize a very classic Proto-Aurignacian, but at much more recent archaeological levels than those predicted until then by our scientific community. Let’s face it. Let’s face it. We would have here more than a restatement of the alleged connections between Europe and the Levant.
But something even more interesting was emerging. In Ksar Akil, between the Initial Upper Paleolithic, the Levantine Neronian and the equivalent of the Proto-Aurignacian, there is something. No less than eight archaeological levels separate the PIO (the first wave) of Ksar Akil from the archaeological elements corresponding to the third wave. In this archaeological sequence, very fine chronologies are rarely accessible due to the lower quality of preservation of the skeletal remains in these climatically hot regions, but these eight archaeological levels have every reason to refer to a temporality of several millennia.
These collections offer us an unexpected look at what seems to correspond to the cultural traditions of a second wave of sapiens to the European continent.
the second wave
At Ksar Akil, between the IUP and the equivalent of the Proto-Aurignacian, thousands of flints show us a craft based on the production of “blunt-backed points”. These Levantine archaeological levels called Early Upper Paleolithic (PUP, literally Early Upper Paleolithic) of Ksar Akil, with their downturned points, technically evoke very precisely and remarkably what in Western Europe we call the Châtelperronian, well-known traditions. attested from Burgundy to Spain and generally attributed… to Neanderthals.
Ludovic Slimak, Provided by the author
The Châtelperroniense is one of the so-called “transition” industries that would mark the entry into modernity of the Neanderthal populations, with blades, flakes and bone or ivory ornaments. But human remains here are also scarce and several researchers have already pointed out that this Neanderthal attribution was uncertain, without being able to explore the precise origin (populations? sapiens ? mestizo populations?) and without being able to establish precise technical, geographical or cultural connections between the Chatelperronian and the traditions sapiens recognized elsewhere in Eurasia.
The comparison with the Levantine data from the Ksar Akil site creates for the first time this very precise bridge between Chatelperronian and sapienssituating these industries in a well-defined and specific cultural context of the populations sapiens of the eastern Mediterranean. The proximity between the European Chatelperonian and the EUP of Ksar Akil finally allows us to propose a well-circumscribed cultural and geographical origin, and in no case Neanderthal, to the European Chatelperonian.
We have here, with the Chatelperroniense, our second wave sapiens.
Rethinking the changes of humanity in Europe
This distinction of three waves sapiens in Europe affects all our refined interpretive frameworks throughout the 20th century, but whose rather simple historical structure (Neanderthal, later sapiens with a supposed Neanderthal acculturation phase in between) had lain unchanged in its backbone since the early 20th century.
Thus, the study that we have just published in PlosOne also shows that in the Levant these 3 Levantine craft traditions pass very gradually, over the millennia, from the IUP to the EUP and finally to the equivalent of the Proto-Aurignacian, confronting us here with the gradual evolutions of a single culture group.
The three migratory impulses towards Europe would thus represent movements of sapiens from a single Levantine cultural substratum.
Regarding the Neanderthals, the proposal to reassign the Chatelperronian to certain populations sapiens whose traditions are well defined and have Levantine roots profoundly affects our own view of the organization of Neanderthal societies at the time of the arrival of the sapiens to Europe. It is also a profound rewriting of our schemas and our understanding of these fossil human populations.
Perhaps, in the end, the Neanderthals disappeared without fundamentally changing anything in their ancestral ways of being in the world.
We are living in an exciting moment of profound remodeling of knowledge that allows us not only to rethink key moments in the history of our continent but, more profoundly, to face what it means to be human in the face of the long history of other humanities, now extinct.
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